Yes, good choice. I didn't include it mostly because I find that Norm's compromises on a few design elements/material selections may guide someone in the 'wrong' direction - but that's a huge value judgement on a book that is a quarter century old.
Another book he was involved with is "This Old House" (technically by Bob Vila I think) which is also good, but suffers again from the march of time. There are just certain things they show that wouldn't be done the same way today.
Air conditioning is not as common in New England (where the author is located) as it is in the rest of the country. I would say about a third of projects I worked on in the Northeast did not have air conditioning, and I was working on pretty expensive houses.
Insulation/air-sealing can get you pretty comfortable in New Hampshire.
It doesn't have to be a lot of work, just paying attention to what you like and dislike in your current home, friend's homes, etc. is most of the battle.
Like, if I asked you what restaurants you like to go to and what some of your favorite meals are you would probably have an answer. If I gave you the choice between two drinks, you could probably pick one over the other (or neither, or both) with some confidence.
In the same way, try to develop opinions about where and how you live.
Ya, you won't find it in commodity construction, but just in case anyone is looking for real linoleum a currently available brand is 'Marmoleum'. It's nice stuff, I've used it on two projects but it's not every client's favorite. By the time a client is looking at sheet flooring it's usually due to cost pressure, and the client ends up going with a vinyl product.
I thought I had notes on a second brand that was more commercially oriented (maybe started with an 'R'?) but I can't remember the name at the moment.
As someone who works in residential construction, this is one of the better looks at what a 'good' process looks like from the homeowner side of the equation. The only places where my advice would differ:
- They finished the floors instead of having a subcontractor do it. Everyone's comfort for various home improvements tasks differs, but this is one that I typically see farmed out. The people who do it everyday are very fast and competent - as a first timer it's hard to avoid making mistakes. I also advise people to avoid floor stains. One advantage to a real wood floor is it's easy to repair and refinish in the future, but this gets a lot harder when you start needing to stain match. Floor stain also kind of violates the tenants of 'honest materials' that the author discusses.
- To build on their point about veneer plaster walls, cost really comes down to subcontractor comfort with that detail. It's only 'slightly more expensive' if you have a contractor that does it all the time. If you live in an area with a lot of plaster homes, you'll have more luck finding someone who can do this work affordably. For example, I once had an architect specify a particular plaster finish ('venetian plaster') where we could not find someone comfortable doing the work within a two hour drive.
- They discuss the slow drying of the floor finish they used as a negative (true). A good place to use slow-drying finishing techniques is the exterior, as you can leave it alone for a lot longer as compared to a floor you want to walk on immediately. For example, pine tar exterior finishing materials take weeks to dry, but you don't NEED to touch the siding during that period.
- In the second part they show a north and south elevation of the finished home. The north elevation really doesn't reflect the historic character they succeeded so hard to emulate and/or build from in other aspects of their home. Comparing these two elevations is very instructive.
I hope their next published section addresses energy efficiency and adjacent topics (like window selection). It's a huge part of building a modern home that doesn't always get the attention it should. I did appreciate the time spent discussing air flow in part 2.
Building on their reading list, if you like older/vernacular homes start with:
"House" by Tracy Kidder
"A Field Guide to American Houses" by Virginia Savage McAlester
"American Shelter" by Lester Walker
"The American House" by Mary Mix Foley
And maybe move on to:
"A Concise History of American Architecture" by Leland Roth
"American Vernacular: Buildings and Interiors, 1870-1960" by Herbert Gottfried
"Norwegian Wood: The Thoughtful Architecture of Wenche Selmer" by Elisabeth Tostrup
"Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn" by Thomas Hubka
And then maybe:
"The Well-Built House" by Jim Locke
"The colonial House Then and Now" by Francis Underwood
Pre-existing requirements for the seasonal storage of manure on dairy farms (primarily because you aren't supposed to spread manure in the winter) means that many dairy farms already have large manure storage lagoons/tanks. These are adapted into digestate storage tanks when the system is installed, although the additional food waste volume can result in additional storage volumes being required. What is nice about some of the manure storage tanks is that you can sometimes just add a 'ring' onto them to increase storage volume.
the digestate is then spread on farm fields using similar methods/equipment used to previously spread manure.
I worked for an entity that eventually got rolled into the subject of the NPR article.
We looked into compression/cleaning for biogas, but both the capital requirement and ongoing operational cost was too high for the gas volume produced by the farm.
I used to work in AD/Composting and the issue I've read about with compost heat recovery was the cost of the recovery system (compost piles are very large) and short equipment life span due to damage by loaders/environmental degradation.
The most consistent use of compost heat has been to ensure proper pathogen reduction in certain waste materials such as wastewater byproducts. A popular example of this is called a 'dutch tunnel' (add 'composting' to that if you google it) where you have a pretty robust, loader accessible composting container which largely self-heats for pathogen reduction. I use the term 'largely self-heats' because there are aeration/mixture characteristics that are required for proper temperature development.
Searching EPA 40 CFR 503 is a good introduction to the process, because there is been a lot written about it and you can easily find guides/introductions.
Introduction of the $5 daily wage also included a reduction in labor hours to 8 hours per day. So no, the $5 wage did not include overtime.
"To run the factory continuously instead of only eighteen hours a day, giving employment to several thousand more men by employing three shifts of eight hours each, instead of only two nine-hour shifts, as at present."
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general...
When Henry Ford set minimum salaries, he wasn't impacting the wages of the engineers who designed the cars - he was impacting the wages of those who made less than $5 at the time the change was made. A minimum wage was being set, not an 'average' wage. So comparing a $5 minimum wage to the 'average wage today including white collar workers like line engineers' fails to be a convincing comparison. It's even less convincing now that I realize, after reviewing your comment, that you're including overtime wages for "Tier 2 union employees" when MrGilbert's data specifically doesn't include overtime wages. If you need to work overtime today to have the same relative affordability as that available a century ago - that's not progress!
Yes, yes - perhaps the autoworkers we are talking about are not 'average' and own fewer cars per household. And yes, yes - moving the minimum wage probably resulted in wage increases for higher paid workers as well. If you want to move the goalposts again do some legwork and show some work, otherwise you're just promoting a paper-thin narrative on the basis of "but what if".
I looked at Doc Martens a long time ago (a decade+) when I was looking for steel-toe non-leather work boots, but none of the vegan Doc Martens boots have steel/composite toe protection. I just checked again, and I think that's still the case.
I've been rocking Bogs Turf Stompers for the last five years or so, but they've been discontinued I think (at least the steel toe version has been).
Anyone else have good luck with non-leather steel/composite toe lace up workboots?
Can anyone find a good way to browse? Closest thing I could find to an index is a alphabetical list of guests - but the formatting is made for mobile or something and you have to keep clicking 'load more' every couple of names.
In creating avenues for discovery ('collections' and 'topics') the simplest one seems to have been ignored - just listing all the segments with relevant metadata. Hopefully I'm just missing something obvious.
I linked to the response sections instead of the paper because the paper is boring.